Passionate Minds

by David Bodanis

  CHâTEAU DE CIREY, AND PARIS, 1734–1735

  Voltaire was so preoccupied that he didn't recognize Emilie was this angry, and at the height of that summer, the end of July, was happy when he arrived back at Cirey. Large portions of the main building were uninhabitable, with ancient, rotting walls and gaping window holes. He had ideas for poems and plays about the injustice of the king's servants destroying works merely because they threatened the conservative religious line; there were conversations he wanted to continue with Emilie on those matters and more. But that would have to wait.

  The weather was still warm, and Voltaire studied what was left of the château. One approach to refurbishing it would be to patch up a single section—such as the rooms where he and Emilie had stayed before—so that he could survive a winter there. But that wouldn't induce Emilie to stay. He knew how much richer than he she'd been while growing up. Yet he had a chance to attract her here, since months ago she'd told de Sade—who no doubt had told Voltaire—that she couldn't bear all the petty gossip of Paris: she would rather end up in the countryside with Voltaire and perhaps a very few other friends.

  To transform the ruin so it was attractive enough would be a huge job. But for the man who'd rigged the outcome of the entire Paris lottery as well as married off Richelieu, it was the sort of challenge he relished. (The château was also conveniently close to border roads leading east to Lorraine and north to the Low Countries, so he could readily escape from the king's police if needed.)

  The first thing to do was get enough cash. Voltaire had made sure that Richelieu owed him money, but it wouldn't do to call on that loan quite so soon. Similarly for the loan to the father of the bride, who might feel perturbed at having lost his close relative de Lixin, even if the husband whom Voltaire had arranged for their family had been justified in stabbing him to death.

  Yet while Voltaire was at Philippsburg he'd been more attentive to the gossip of the quartermasters than the noble officers had been. They had been brought up to pay no attention to the sources of whatever wealth they'd managed to obtain. Voltaire, however, had learned that there was a glut of wheat imports at the great harbor of Marseilles. Cirey was isolated—the nearest town was leagues away, and the occasional coach from Paris took up to a week to make it there. Even the main wine region of Champagne was well to the north, where the land was flatter than this forested waste. But ever since his return from England six years before, in 1728, he'd been developing contacts across France who could carry out the financial transactions he wished.

  Instructions went out, by messengers on horseback, for his administrators to buy grain shipments from North Africa and ensure that the ships diverted to ports in Spain and Italy. The sale price would be higher than at Marseilles, where the local glut would have held down prices. But the merchants shipping the grain wouldn't know of the different sales prices available, so his original purchase costs would remain the same: only his profits would go up.

  For more immediate returns, Voltaire remembered the thousands of men—and equally large numbers of horses and transport mules— at Philippsburg. The siege had ended in a French victory, albeit with the commander suffering the misfortune of having his head separated from his body by an enemy cannonball. But the army was still in the field, and Voltaire sent out further instructions to purchase forage, cloth, and food at likely locations along the troops' supply path. Quartermasters in the field can't bargain. Here too Voltaire was buying cheap and selling dear. What he sold the army would bring in extra cash, and quickly.

  It was ingenious, as always. But he'd become used to finding unsuspected sources of income. In all the time since his play Oedipus was produced, back in 1718, not a single poem or play or essay he'd written had been allowed to be sold openly in France. Without his business skills he'd have had to end up as paid flatterer for a famous aristocrat or official in order to survive—and his ambition was too great for that.

  Now Voltaire could get to work. Relying on the advances from his sales of army supplies, as well as from his own reserves in Paris that he could still draw on (even though he would be imprisoned if he went there in person), he began to hire architects and experienced foremen. He didn't own Cirey, Florent-Claude's family did, but Voltaire was confident that in time they would come to an agreement about how much to pay him back for the improvements he would make.

  Soon Voltaire's foremen were hiring manual workers for ditch digging and heavy construction; then they began to search out all the carpenters and masons and plasterers nearby villages could provide. He was pretty clear about what he wanted. There would be a great new wing, where he'd have his study and bedroom, and he'd entirely refurbish part of the old building—that would be for Emilie's arrival. As to the rest of the ruin, well, it would be enough to make sure that there was a big, usable kitchen. Guest rooms were much less important than ensuring that Emilie's window would be perfectly constructed and balanced, that she would have an attractive view.

  That the dream he was preparing for her would come true. All this work drew the attention of most local residents, which didn't slow Voltaire down too much, but it also drew the attention of the very few wealthy individuals who lived in the vicinity. There were two families in particular that counted, even though they were in different villages several miles away. Voltaire knew that any men in those families wouldn't have much voice—this was the French countryside, after all, where women ruled—and all his surviving correspondence is addressed solely to Madame de Champbonin and to the comtesse de la Neuville.

  From the beginning he expressed his shock—his amazement— that two such cultivated women were to be found in this isolated region. He felt, he wrote to the portly Madame de Champbonin when she sent baskets of her favorite fruits, that he must be back in Paris, for never had he received such graciously apt offerings. And as for the quite young comtesse de la Neuville, did she realize that among all the ladies he had known at the court, there were none—or perhaps none that he could yet reveal the name of—who dressed as stylishly as she?

  They were immediately on his side, which meant that their husbands and other male relatives were on his side—and this, as Voltaire would have understood all along, meant that there were no grumbles from any other scattered gentry about his bidding up the salaries for servants, let alone denuding one hamlet after another of able workers at this harvest time. Also, as it turned out, both Champbonin (“my little Champenoise,” he soon called her) and Neuville were agreeable enough to have around. For when Emilie came down life might get boring—despite all their conversations—unless there was some possibility of local diversion, or at least outsiders to take extra parts in the amateur dramatics he liked to put on.

  There would be one more gift to ensure that Emilie stayed. The Letters from England had brought him nothing but harm, yet theater was something with which he knew he was safe. There was a particular play he had been thinking about for a while, almost since he'd first met Emilie, and although he'd never done more than sketch it, now— despite the builders, and the neighbors, and the forges that he had to supervise being refurbished in the forests for charcoal—he vowed he would get it done before Emilie arrived from Paris.

  He called it Alzire. It would be set in the jungles of South America, at the time when the Spanish conquistadors were beginning to administer the great Inca empire they'd conquered. (It was common to use distant societies for parables to safely criticize France.) His writing was deeper here than in any drama he'd done before, since he desperately wanted Emilie to respect him for it.

  In this new play there was a virile young Inca leader, and the woman he'd go through anything to live with—that of course was necessary, to show Emilie how much he would do for her. But the play also carried the theme of whether good individuals can redeem a corrupt organization, for Voltaire hadn't made all the Spanish officials uniformly malevolent. To keep the multilayered story advancing, his hero would escape by galloping to Philippsburg—no, the Inca hero would escape by findi
ng a breach in some Spanish fortress walls. And then…

  Then what? “To be able to keep an audience interested for five acts, that's a gift of God,” Voltaire complained in a letter to his friend Cideville.

  He finally did work it out, and this question of whether a government could be reformed from within was central to the young writers who were increasingly turning to Voltaire as their guide. The issue was certainly topical. Not only was the Church utterly removed from the teachings of Jesus—with spoiled children of rich families being bought positions as bishops, as we've seen—but the basic administration was incompetent to a level that's hard to imagine today.

  The secretary of state, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, who hated Voltaire for his social ascent, had been brought into the government at age fourteen and later appointed director of the French navy despite having no naval experience whatsoever. This was not ideal for military success. At one important moment, when a French fleet was sent to Quebec to reclaim the fortress of Louisbourg after a successful British attack, Phélypeaux chose as admiral a young relative who had never been on the Atlantic. (Though in fairness to Phélypeaux, throughout the quarter century that he was navy minister he still was more able than most of the other aristocratic officers and administrators he had to work with.)

  The aristocrats whom the king appointed to top jobs were incapable of collecting the government's own taxes, and sold the job to rich private individuals who filched as much of the revenue as they could. There were a few centers of independent power, as with the old Parlements in Paris and other major cities. But those groups too were encrusted with bias and a near-total lack of what we'd recognize as concern for the public's quality of life. The Paris Parlement in particular was run by near dynasties of religiously intense lawyers who believed that money was far better spent on radical preachers than on hospitals or public health measures. Dead bodies, for example, were kept in very shallow graves in churches across Paris. It was clear, as Voltaire wrote, that “This custom causes epidemic maladies every year, [because] the corruption resulting from so many bodies infects the air.” But since it was a tradition, and holy, it wasn't going to be changed.

  There were a few efficient technocrats within the government, but they tended to be midlevel civil engineers, especially ones involved in constructing roads and canals. They had some successes. A useful road alongside the Loire near Anjou was being finished, building on a route that had scarcely been improved since the twelfth century; plans and early construction were under way for an express service for mail, using relays of horses, linking Paris with the big western ports of Nantes and Brest. “It is time for France to start ruling, after having spent so much time trying to get something to rule,” one supporter wrote (referring to the expansive wars Louis XIV had spent years on). Yet these planners constantly had to struggle for funds and were infuriated that their budgets were dwarfed by what was wasted at Court.

  Several of these engineers came to share the attitudes of the thinkers and writers who knew that Voltaire had been writing mocking accounts of their government's incompetence for years. They didn't think of themselves as forming an “Enlightenment” yet, and they were certainly outnumbered by the ordinary readers and writers of cheap romances. But it was an important, waiting audience.

  A few years earlier, they and others had enjoyed the aristocratic writer Montesquieu's ironic published account of a naive Persian visitor to Paris. What Voltaire was doing in the play he was writing for Emilie was taking that further: using details of a political tale (this time “far away” in the mountains of South America) to make clear the weak points in the French state's power here at home. He didn't go so far as to propose a full system of promotion on merit. But he knew that many listeners would like the idea that administrators already in place should at least take more rational and humane action.

  August ended, and Emilie was still in Paris, which was fine, since the château construction was only just under way. But by September she still hadn't arrived. Champbonin and Neuville were more and more excited. To have a new companion in their isolated region! Voltaire knew the stay would only be for a few months this first time, and he had plans for what he and Emilie could do after, eagerly explaining to friends that the two of them could be visited later in Paris, since “I will be there in all likelihood toward Christmas.” But then October arrived, the weather was cooling—and there was still no Emilie.

  The two neighboring ladies were becoming suspicious that maybe Voltaire's new lady wasn't so keen to live here after all. Voltaire had to placate them as they waited. Champbonin—with her healthy appetite— was given a fresh boar's head; the taller Neuville was simply given more compliments on her beauty. If Voltaire was worried, he gave only a few clues. And then, halfway through October, in a rush and tumble of crates, after the bone-shaking, nearly weeklong journey from Paris, Emilie did arrive.

  It wasn't a good visit. She'd spent the summer still upset about how much he'd put himself—and thus the possibility of their relation—in danger with his thoughtless actions: the untrustworthy printer, the stunt at Philippsburg; the subsequent book burning, and flight. Now in Cirey she tried goading Voltaire by pointedly writing to Maupertuis; she told friends that she felt profoundly alone, that she was filling her time till she could leave by reading Mr. Locke.

  Voltaire didn't fight her. He was too proud for that. He watched her countermand his orders to the architects and builders: everything he was doing was wrong.

  Champbonin and Neuville were beside themselves with eagerness to come over, and Voltaire automatically gave his usual graceful explanations for why they couldn't yet do so, promising that in just a few more days everything would be right for a visit. He even left Emilie alone for a few days, riding away entirely from Cirey on his favorite horse, but when he came back she hadn't changed. She returned to Paris, late in December, alone. She'd skimmed the new Inca play he'd written for her, but she made no detailed comments about it. Nor had they agreed when they'd meet again.

  Earlier, before the icy visit, Voltaire had written to a friend: “I've been reading Locke again, and I'm playing with the idea of trying out his approach.” Locke was an attractive guide for fresh writing, since—like Descartes, but even more independently of past religious solutions—he was known for proposing ways that calm thinking could reveal flaws in government administrations, as much as in the individual mind. Once such flaws were revealed, then there was at least a chance of them being fixed.

  It was an appealing idea for Voltaire at this time, but his energy was fading. He knew what would help: “There's a woman in Paris, named Emilie,” he casually wrote to a friend, “who outdoes everyone in intelligence. She understands Locke much better than me. It would be sweet to have such a guide.”

  But he was alone now, and it would just have to be different. There were working fireplaces here and there in the partially constructed rooms, and he would survive the winter. He had plenty of books.

  And now he had all the time he could wish.

  Emilie arrived back in Paris, and for a brief while even tried a fling with Maupertuis again. “Let's go to Midnight Mass together,” she wrote him on December 24. “We can listen to the hymns on the organ and then…ah, maybe I'll go home with you.” But it was clear that neither of them was in love with the other. He treated her merely as a mistress and not as a potential intellectual partner: making her wait outside the Academy of Sciences but never trying to invite her in, breaking appointments and instead planning with his male friends the trip he had convinced the Academy to send him on, to measure possible distortions of the Earth's curvature in the polar north.

  This was worse than having no man at all. She didn't really want Maupertuis—she was just using him as a stopgap while trying to decide about Voltaire—but the rebuffs were insulting. She started waiting at the cafés where thinkers went; she found herself breaking her own appointments with her friends; she seems to have started drinking. A police official who was having his in
formers keep an eye on everyone who'd been associated with Voltaire reported, “One more thing… Mme du Châtelet now seems to be doing everything she can to deserve the label of madwoman.” One evening, infuriated at how coldly Maupertuis was excluding her from his plans for the polar expedition, she even took a carriage to the western edge of Paris, jumped on a horse she'd arranged to have waiting, and galloped on her own to the isolated house at Mt. Valérien where he was meeting with other scientists. She banged unannounced on the door late at night to be let in.

  Back home in the light of day—bruised from the riding and having had a sudden night's sex with Maupertuis, with her servants bursting with gossip and her children loud in their rooms—Emilie realized she'd gone too far. It was not a way she could continue to live.

  She had an important decision to make, but her female friends in Paris were too superficial to give wise advice, she knew that. Her sweet father, Louis-Nicolas, would have been ideal, but he had died years ago. Yet there was one other individual from her childhood whose kindness and insight she'd always trusted. She'd barely contacted him during all these years since, but there was no reason to think he'd be offended.

  And Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, now almost eighty years old, was always willing to help a beautiful marquise who was alone beneath the heavens, trying to decide her fate.

  They went for a slow, hours-long stroll, in the summer dusk, right in the Tuileries gardens across from her old family home. He liked wearing a natty yellow waistcoat, and probably used a cane to help his slow steps. But he listened to his late friend's daughter, and he asked gentle questions, as if he understood the intensity that youthful passion could bring.

  Voltaire thrilled her, but he could also break her heart again. Yet if she avoided him and stayed in Paris, all she could hope for was to find a somewhat better replacement for Maupertuis—and was she really old enough, in her late twenties, to feel that the hope of real love in her life was past? She wouldn't even have the chance of going on interesting trips, for Maupertuis and almost all other educated men were so smugly male that they'd never take her on their travels. There was so much she wished to do: she'd never been to the Royal Society in England, never shared ideas directly with important thinkers. A woman on her own couldn't travel abroad—but with a man who really admired her and was loving to her, maybe she could. She felt alive when she was with Voltaire, receiving hints of the intellectual inspiration she craved.